Master Bowties

What Are Master Bowties?

A Master Bowtie is a bowtie analysis that functions as a template or standardized model for visualizing and controlling common risks across multiple business locations or work sites. Rather than having to develop their own unique risk bowties from scratch, site managers can subscribe to Master Bowties as a starting point and tweak as necessary to account for the site-specific needs, local or regional compliance requirements, or local language or practice variations. Knowledge, processes and controls for managing common risks are stored and distributed from one common bowtie – the Master Bowtie.

Why Use Master Bowties?

Businesses with multiple locations or distributed work sites often share similar operations, and therefore, encounter similar risks. But if individual sites are assessing those risks and implementing risk controls independently from one other, you’re more than likely to experience gaps and inconsistencies in risk management processes across each of your sites — creating even greater risk to your organization.

So how do we align our risk management processes from the top-down to facilitate greater information sharing and control risk as effectively as possible, while still providing flexibility to support the unique risk management needs of every work site? That’s where the value of Master Bowties truly shines. Master Bowties offer a way to instantly communicate and implement updates to risk scenarios, risk controls, key risk indicators (KRIs) and other risk information across multiple locations. Other benefits of Master Bowties include:

• Standardized identification and control of risks throughout the organization
• Improved sharing of risk information and risk management best practices
• Reduced time and resources required to develop and review risk bowties and perform other risk management activities at individual locations/work sites
• Reduced administrative costs and increased stakeholder engagement with your risk management programs

How VelocityEHS Can Help

VelocityEHS Risk Management solutions make it easy to build and distribute Master Bowties which users across multiple sites can then subscribe to and deploy at their individual locations, giving you top-down visibility and control of risk management processes across your entire organization. From there, site owners can modify the master bowties as necessary to address the unique needs, requirements, risk sources and controls at individual sites. Whenever the elements of your master bowties are updated, site owners are instantly and automatically notified so they can review and ultimately incorporate those changes into their individual risk registers. In addition, our Bowtie Review Wizard has helped users reduce the time-to-review from an average of 2 hours to just 10-15 minutes, and cut the duration of their annual site risk reviews by nearly 90%.